Clockwise

Perry climbed over the garden wall. She never used the gate, loving the way the stone felt solid beneath her hands; always familiar. From her spot on the ledge, the tree seemed skeletal, almost bare. She found him there, surrounded by leaves the color of butter.

“They’re falling too fast,” Thatcher said when Perry waved from the wall. She’d been visiting this way since the early days of their friendship, and Thatcher’s house felt like home.

“I missed you at school today,” Perry said. She felt the handle of the half-broken teacup beneath her knee. Thatcher’s mom had added it to the other pieces plastered into the garden wall when they were little, and it remained Perry’s favorite spot.

“My mom doesn’t know I skipped,” he said, pointing to the backyard. Perry didn’t see her, but nodded. She swung her legs, careful not to disrupt the handle of the teacup beneath her.

“Ever wonder who we’ll be when we’re done with school?” Perry asked. “Like we’ll leave, we’ll love, we’ll become different people.”

Though the early September sun started to set, there was still enough light to see the way Thatcher squinted up at the tree, too much worry in the creases of his forehead. Leaves fell, seasons changed; it never bothered Thatcher.

But Perry understood. Sometime soon, there might be a full season in which everything changed.

“Would it help to pretend the future is a person? I always find talking to hypotheticals like real people much easier,” Thatcher said.

Perry jumped down from the wall to join him beneath the tree.

“Just imagine,” Thatcher said. He always seemed to be imagining other places, thinking about other people. And being friends with him meant dealing with the strange things he did or said, while everyone else just existed. “Future would say something like, Find someone you can share all your truths with. I think that might be love,” he said.

“Or maybe, Love is about being lost,” she said. “People seek happiness and think it’s love.”

Perry wondered if Thatcher would someday leave, and find something better; some place happier.

Maybe everyone tried much too hard to be happy in a world where they should be grateful. Or surprised. Or content.

Sitting here with Thatcher beneath the tree, she felt content.

“I don’t think I’ll be here,” Thatcher said, looking up at the tree like he saw something she couldn’t.

Thatcher’s words chilled Perry more than the wind turning the leaves inside out. She didn’t want him to talk about other places, even imaginary ones, because she couldn’t imagine Thatcher anywhere but here. Even his thoughts being elsewhere made her feel hollow.

She remembered the way Thatcher used to talk about a place he wanted to go, an address just as nonsensical as himself. And she imagined that 65 ½ now, a wrought-iron gate freckled from rust and old age, speaking in creaks.

“We should have tea,” Thatcher said.

Perry felt the future closing around her. She felt it in the way Thatcher needed to understand what might happen in a month or a year from now; seeking some distant happiness.

He walked back toward his house, but Perry didn’t follow. Instead, she stared at the pieces of glass on the garden wall, patterned with flowers and fine filigree. All of it had been whole once, broken by a past event Perry couldn’t remember. But knowing it already happened, that the pieces would remain where they were forever, made her feel better than anything else.

“Perry!” Thatcher called from the backyard minutes later. The way he said her name was nice; simple and honest and real.

“Do we have to?” Perry asked when Thatcher handed her a tea cup. He looked back at her with small eyes, pleading with her.

“Just one,” he said, and she knew it only took him one cup. He was better at reading tea leaves than skylines or wind patterns or even at reading her the past few months.

“No sugar?” Perry asked, sipping on the bitter black tea.

“It’ll ruin the reading. Now think of your question,” Thatcher said. He drank his tea and closed his eyes, savoring the liquid.

The way they talked about the future, finding their fate in tea cups, should’ve unsettled her. But such moments felt like worship: to the stars and their friendship; the profundity eclipsed by the simplicity of being here, now, with the promise of a hundred or so more moments spent just like this.

When she finished her tea, Thatcher took her cup, and swirled the remains three times clockwise, “For future events,” he said, but Perry already knew that. He tipped her cup back on the saucer without a sound, her future in practiced hands.

Perry focused on the way he stood, shifting from one foot to the other, as if the future were there waiting for him.

He dropped her cup without a whisper of what he’d seen, and then smashed his own against the tree.

“Thatcher?” she asked, too afraid to say anything else.

His voice creaked when he said her name, “Perry.”

He knelt to pick up the pieces of the cups before pulling her away from the tree, and she let him, because the ground smelled bitter like the tea. It caught in her throat and took her voice.

                                                                                                      ***

“The future scares me, too,” he said, brushing a leaf from the garden wall. He examined what was left of the cups, a bucket of mortar at his feet.

Together they pressed the pieces into an empty section of the wall. The small shards felt real in her hand. She knew they would exist one second, one moment from now. And that was enough.

Written by: Kayla King
Photograph by: Jennifer Stevens

Arcadia

The melodic tune pulls Kasha from sleep. The warmth in the room and the softness of the alarm disorient her, and for a moment she forgets what it all means. She forgets that if she is being woken, it is because they have arrived at the outer rim. It means that her eyes are about to open for the first time in thirty-five years. Kasha is about to become the first human to ever look directly upon this quiet corner of the universe.

Despite the distance from Earth, the images from this part of the galaxy are familiar to almost every human being alive. For years, the human race has watched as the pictures and data have poured in from the Hannu Satellite. The human civilization that remains on Earth has explored and discovered all they can about this place while Kasha and her crew slept--preserved for this mission while time moved on relentlessly outside their vessel.

Kasha was only seven years old when the satellite launched, but she remembers the day clearer than any other day of her childhood. Her parents hushed her and her brothers so they could hear the broadcast. She stood watching over their shoulders, her eyes unable to make sense of what she was seeing. The satellite was unlike any other in human history, built from a crystalline material, cylindrical and hollow, divided into multiple sections, separated by ridges. It reflected light like glass and moved with beauty and grace.

The satellite was sent to investigate a distant moon. It was evident, even back then, that the salvation of the human race lay in the discovery of habitable planets and not in recovery or preservation of what was left of Earth. It was too late for that. Years of warnings from experts and climatologists, and still change had proven too difficult for humanity. After the launch was announced, the distant moon--previously known as ml9 J29w--was nicknamed Arcadia by the media. The name stuck. Arcadia, a small moon on the edge of our galaxy, more likely to support life than any other landscape investigated thus far.

Three days after the launch, Kasha asked about the satellite over dinner, wondering if it had arrived at Arcadia.

“You will be a grown woman when the satellite finally arrives.” Her father laughed before gulping down his last sip of water and tipping his ice cubes onto his dinner plate. He held the empty glass on its side demonstrating how the design of the Hannu Satellite was unlike any other. His tiny satellite whizzed through imaginary space while Kasha and her brothers giggled at his antics until their mother told him to put down her good crystal. The family moved on to other conversations, but Kasha remained transfixed--the crystal tumbler was no longer a cup peacefully reflecting light on the dining room table; it had become the Hannu satellite, thousands of miles away on the most important mission in all of human history.

35 years later, working at NASA, Kasha was one of the first to look upon the images that poured in once the satellite arrived at Arcadia.

“It’s amazing, Kasha. The mountains and oceans, forests and clean air. It is like a second Earth empty and undamaged.”

“It’s a second chance.” Smiling at her colleague, Kasha held back the tears as the words escaped her lips. “We need to go there.”

“Of course. NASA will eventually send a manned mission.”

“Not eventually, we need to go there now. If we leave today, it will be 35 years before we can send back word of what we find. How long do you think we have left before things start to really unravel? We need to be ready to colonize. We need to go soon.”

Kasha was the natural candidate to lead the mission. She never hesitated when the proposal was put before her, not when she realised it would be a one-way trip, or when her mother cried at her feet.

As the team leader, she is the first to be roused from cryo-sleep. She will wake her team once she has gotten her bearings and reviews any urgent messages from Earth. The cabin is warm and dimly lit, the monitors blink and hum peacefully from across the room. Kasha swims through the air, weightless now that she has been removed from the pressurized environment of the cryo chamber. She propels herself smoothly towards the only window in the cabin.

Arcadia shines with familiar luminescence. The water is blue and the clouds are white, but the land masses curve in new and unrecognized shapes.

Kasha withdraws from the window and awakens the monitor to retrieve the messages from Earth. There is one marked urgent, which does not surprise her. In thirty-five years, of course something urgent would occur.

Kasha waits for the message to load while stretching her muscles, and pulls a water packet from the pantry. Returning to the monitor, she sees that the images have loaded while the audio message continues to encode. She flips through the first few, confused by what she is seeing. The mounds seem at first to be nothing more than hills nestled in close to a cliff. As she flips through the pictures it becomes clear that the mounds are man made. She doesn’t understand why they have sent images of primitive villages. She flips through the images taken from far above, shots of rough roads and orderly linear fields and dams and simple irrigation canals. Kasha has the mind of a scientist; she is not quick to jump to conclusions without proper evidence. The pictures unfurl on the screen and the truth they reveal solidifies in her mind.

The words pass Kasha’s lips just as the audio message finishes encoding. Her voice is mirrored by the far distant voice recorded years ago on Earth.

“We are not alone.”

Written by: Sarah Scott

Photograph by: Daniel Vidal

A Feeling Like Freedom (Tales from the Academy)

(Continued from Anatomy of the Inhuman Heart.)

The sun beats down hard and hot. Desh feels sweat drip down his neck and pool against the collar of his shirt. He is sure that he is minutes away from melting into a tepid puddle on the sidewalk leading to the Academy.

Kat walks beside him, platinum blonde hair dusting the tops of her ears. Kat rolls the sleeves of her blazer up just enough to see the edges of tattoos, unfinished and disconnected. Some of them are thick black line segments, like forgotten connect-the-dots. He wonders if that is the point: if something is never supposed to get finished, it can never be interrupted.

“I can’t believe they do drills outside in this,” Kat says, “I can barely walk.”

“Same,” Desh says. “Whose idea was this again?”

“It is a good story, Desh,” Kat flashes him a cheeky smile, “but maybe you could’ve suggested it in the spring.”

“Not with my allergies,” Desh replies.

“Do you know where we are supposed to go?” Kat gestures to the building in front of them, a squat concrete structure with dozens of onyx screens peppered onto the mottled surface. Green energy. Nice.

“We’re supposed to meet Lieutenant Colonel Chisholm — he’s the guy who runs this place — and Senator Nora Ness.”

“She’s the one who funds it?”

“Exactly.”

When they arrive at the front of the building they discover there aren’t any doors. A mechanical voice echoes over an intercom and, after a pause to confirm identities and schedules, a shiny panel slides back. Desh shivers when the blast of cool air hits him, and he and Kat skitter inside.

“This is great. We never get visitors,” the mechanical voice says.

Desh and Kat stare. The mechanical voice belongs to a boy floating in the wall next to them. Bottle green glass separates them, and a patchwork of icons flash on the surface. The boy taps a short sequence and his feet fall gently to the floor as the glass recedes. Rows of black, narrow barrels slide into the wall.

“Were those guns?” Kat whispers.

“I’m Tony,” the boy reaches out to shake hands. He wears a form-fitting white jumpsuit that contrasts with the darkness of his skin. He’s bald, and the top of his head shines in the florescent light. It is hard for Desh to look at him, to take in his toothy grin and the shaving wounds on his jawline, his skull.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Tony continues, gesturing to what would seem to be the reception desk.

“Marvels of modern technology,” Desh says. “I’d love to learn more about it, if you have time — but we seem to be a bit short on it, at the moment.”

“Don’t worry; Lieutenant Colonel Chisholm and Senator Ness are in a meeting that’s running long,” Tony says. “They also wanted to make sure you got the latest itinerary. Sent to the New New Republic office this morning.”

“Probably not, seeing as we don’t work out of the office. Just editors.” Kat sighs.

Tony steps back into the reception area and taps against a small panel. He asks for their email addresses and within seconds, their tablets and phones trill and chime notifications.

Kat is the first to react, pulling Desh aside. Presumably to avoid Tony overhearing, though Desh would like to point out the whole place is probably bugged.

“Only one of us in the Chisholm/Ness interview? That’s bullsh —”

“We say no, we’re out. You do their interview, I’ll cover the others.”

“You pitched it,” Kat argues.

“And you’re better at high profile. Come on, it’ll be fine.”

An hour later, Desh regrets his decision. He has a small break before his next round of interviews, a blend of older students about to graduate to the front lines and their faculty advisors.

“So, why are you at the Academy?” Desh attempts to make small talk with Tony.

“My parents gave me the choice between MegaChurch Youth Seminary or the Academy. The MCYS doesn’t have cool toys.”

Tony takes him down a long, blinding white hallway. Desh fights the urge to put on his scratched aviators and tries to ignore how his shoes squeak on the tile. It sounds like the dolphin show at OceanPlanet.

The room is little more than a closet. Desh and Tony squeeze in. Tony adjusts the settings on an unfamiliar machine and hands Desh a lightweight plastic headset.

“Put it on,” he says. “When I come in here, I have to use the SkySuit module. I’ve got most of this room memorized. You get the trainee experience today. SkyLite, if you will.”

The headset connects. Desh sees a warm, happy blue. Green and brown blurs rotate into view, and Desh recognizes the greige concrete of the Academy. The simulation spins and somersaults, flirting with clouds and the thick canopy of a forest.

When was the last time Desh felt like he was flying, fast and free? He remembers a bright, sunny day from his childhood, running up and down a beach whose name escapes him. He hears the waves, the caw of birds, and his own laughter.

The simulation cuts to black and Tony’s voice pulls him back to the present.

“Cool, right? Best part about this place.”

“One of the best sims I’ve ever seen,” Desh says.

“Oh, it’s not a sim. Those are the senior-level students in the flight track. I patched you into one of the live feeds during their air time.” Tony smiles. “That was Lady Danger. She’s our best.”

“Flight track?” Desh swallows. The room feels more cramped than it was before. Desh realizes the black screens on the outside of the Academy are not solar panels. The Academy is also a hangar.

“Most of us can choose which track we want to take depending on our Standardized Army Test scores, hands-on modules, and simulations. Flight’s where I want to be: in the air, no constraints, just the horizon ahead of me. That’s freedom, man.”

Desh nods, but he can’t shake the feeling that it’s still a simulation.

Written by: Erin Justice
Photograph by: Daniel Vidal

Anatomy of the Inhuman Heart (Tales from the Academy)

Ren became an orphan and a soldier in the span of twelve hours.

It started with the bright white light of her tablet, the notification a signal flare arcing against a starless sky.

Groaning, she tapped the blocky red letters and closed her eyes. He’s forgotten about the time difference again.

Ren settled back into the covers, the comforter warm and soft against her chin. She felt sleep embrace her, but the call light cleaved through the darkness.

He meant to call someone else.

She pressed the red letters and rolled onto her back. Anxiety gnawed at her, ground away her desire for sleep and Ren found herself grabbing the tablet and tapping away until her father’s face was there, washed with worry and fear.

“What’s wrong?” Ren asked, and a dozen possibilities turn over in her mind. Her mother, her siblings, his job. But Occam’s Razor has no place in war. There is no room for simplicity among hatred.

“An attack,” her father said. She slid her fingers against a slender glass tab and activates a wider, brighter screen across from the bed. Ren saw images her mind refused to reconcile.

Her country. The iconic snow-topped mountain. A mushroom cloud. Cherry blossoms fluttering in a radioactive breeze.

She slid her fingers again. Light left the room, save for her father’s face, small and weak with its own darkness.

“But you are not in Tokyo,” Ren choked, knowing what he would say.

“It is not just Tokyo.”

“Tell me,” she demanded. She listened as he explained what the news outlets will spend weeks covering in detail, with bold, colorful interactive maps and graphics: analysts standing in the middle of renderings of Kyoto Ground Zero and Tokyo Ground Zero, anchors charting the bombings across Kyushu and Shikoku. Damage dealt by China, all pretense of positive relations smoldering.

With her father, it was black and white. He stayed home, sick with flu, and he could not get in touch with her mother and sisters. He has tried to use the locator app, but — and he would not look at her as the words spilled out in a sob — no user connection.

“Leave,” Ren said.

“It’s too late.”

“They’ll come,” Ren insisted, though she isn’t sure who “they” are and when and how they will arrive. “Someone will come. International aid, survivors’ camps — ”

“Ren,” her father met her eyes. Across a war zone that did not exist yesterday, across an ocean, they saw each other for what they are: a father and his favorite daughter, a dying man and a survivor.

“No,” she said. Her jaw trembled, oscillating between rage and mourning.

“I called to say goodbye.”

They spoke for another half hour, until the signal ended — tragically? Mercifully? Ren can never decide.

Ren looked around the room, Spartan with its single large screen. She felt like a caged animal, breathing stale air and circling, ready to attack. When she unlatched the door she felt cool freedom, tears drying into streaks of salt on her cheeks like war paint.

Ren tallied her losses. She tallied the losses of those who could not.

The recruiting office buzzed with jingoistic rhetoric, electric currents of pride and racism pulsing around her. Ren wanted to shake the men, women, and children who glared at her.

She remembers learning about the internment camps during World War II and how magazines published ways to tell Chinese and Japanese people apart. There were buttons with big bold letters: I AM CHINESE.

Ren considered making one of her own, one that might light up with flashing neon letters, lowercase in the style of the microblogs and pop journo sites: i am japanese-american!

Or better: i hurt, too <appropriate emoji>!

But not what she felt, never the words she wanted to scream at them as they stared and hated and judged: I lost something, and you want only to gain.

When her turn came, she signed on the line and enlisted like the others.

                                                                                              ***

The campus sprawls over forty acres, though Lieutenant Colonel Chisholm assures them additional funding has been approved to purchase more land, build more facilities, remodel staff quarters. Nervous chuckles ripple from the new recruits, men and women responsible for the success of the Academy and its progeny, like this place is a living organism.

They walk into the main building, a massive umbrella sculpture of fabric and seams welcoming them in shades of orange and vermillion.

The heart of the Academy, Ren thinks. It feels like her own: ripped open and inverted, rearranged into something macabre. It beats not to sustain life, but to avenge the dead. Vessels that once constricted and pumped blood have been fashioned into spikes pulsing poison.

Ren tastes bile and the room swims before her, the heart of the Academy throbbing, pounding in the atrium. She hears the blood rushing in her ears and it sounds like the drums of war. She breathes long and deep until she feels weightless, drained of the fever that boils her blood and makes her see red and hatred everywhere.

Temper your rage.

                                                                                              ***

“I like your hair. Not many women going for the traditional crew cut.” Desh’s mouth spreads in a delicate grin. It’s different from the too-wide garish smiles the others have given her, the words of a compliment betrayed by the ticks of the disingenuous. Ren decides to trust this man, even though her CO warned otherwise.

“Thanks, but I think I went too extreme. It needs to grow out. And I kind of miss my bun.”

“Did they tell you why I was here?”

“Reporter for pop journo site New New Republic,” Ren says.

“I’m writing about the success of the Academy, getting perspectives from different people in the trenches. We’ll give everyone pseudonyms. Lieutenant Colonel’s orders,” Desh says. “Tell me some things about you. Give me a sense of Specialist Ren Mori.”

“I manufacture murder,” Ren says, “and I try to live with that choice.”

Ren looks at Desh, who has sad, dark eyes like her father did. She continues.

“Some days are easier than others.”

Written by: Erin Justice

Photograph by: Emily Blincoe

The True Test

Max hesitates and looks up and down the antiseptic hallway, stark white and silent. Dozens of scanners glow next to dim portals, each leading to a bright exam room.

The watch vibrates an alarm. He’s going to be late. Max sighs and places his hand on the screen. The portal displays a series of numbers and biometrics, as well as the same terrible picture of a younger, pimply-faced Max. The portal spirals open and Max steps through.

A young woman with short, choppy hair is in his exam room.

“My name is Ren,” she smiles. “It was clear Dr. Rosen was not making any progress.”

“I wasn’t nice to Dr. Rosen. I didn’t know his name, though,” Max says, as though it makes a difference. Last week his test response was a thinly-veiled story about a clever boy imprisoned by a fat, evil king. Max has been paying for it all week with brutal drills in the SimRoom.

“I don’t expect you to be nice to me. Not when I look like the enemy.” Ren’s smile seems sharper, more pointed and ferocious.

“Don’t do that. You aren’t the enemy.” Max says. “You’re Japanese. Are you one of the survivors?”

“No,” Ren exhales and looks down at her notes. She drags her red pen across the paper, drawing sad loops.

They do not say the words they are both thinking, born from different memories of the same terrible day. Max does not ask her if she lost family during the Crimson Terror. Ren does not ask him if he joined the Academy because he was caught up in narrative driven by revenge.

Their expressions tell their stories: loss and hatred.

“I’m sorry,” Max says. “I didn’t mean — ”

“How did you know?” Ren asks. Her expression is a blend of sadness and curiosity. She wipes a stray tear away with an ink-stained finger, leaving a smear of violent red in its wake.

“My dad made me memorize the family tree back through the First Civil War,” Max says, “after World War II, my great-great-grandfather married a Japanese nurse named Ren.”

“Without that, would you have known?”

“Probably not,” Max admits. “But if you’re at the Academy, you have to be good, right?”

Ren does not respond. She taps on the table and dozens of blooms rise from its center. There are massive sunflowers and vibrant posies, curled fiddlehead ferns and drooping tulips in every shade Max can imagine. It is the most color he has seen in years.

“This is your thirty-seventh test, Max. Create a story,” Ren says.

“Wait,” Max says. He pulls a clean white screen cloth from one of the many pockets in his jumpsuit. He hands it to Ren, her wide brown eyes wet with uncried tears. She stares at it. Max gestures to her eye.

“You’ve got ink there,” he explains.

“Thank you,” Ren says, dabbing the stain until it disappears. When she gives the cloth back to Max, her fingers brush against his.

She pulls her hand away and taps on the table again. A wide ceramic bowl appears under the floating flowers. Max looks up and plucks different stems from the holographic network garden above him.

“He fell in love with the smartest woman he knew,” Max begins.

                                                                                               ***
At the ninety-eighth test, Max requests a cipher.

“A cipher?” Ren’s voice is even, but her dark brown eyes light up. It is the only way they can laugh together.

“A key,” Max replies, his blue eyes wide and bright. He almost cracks a smile, but bites his bottom lip instead. Ren blushes and glances at her notes.

“Please, Ren. I’ve been telling the story all wrong! Flowers have different meanings, and if the man is in love with her, he can’t send her flowers that mean friendship or sympathy.”

“In your story, you assume the woman cares about the meanings of the flowers instead of the overwhelming affection behind the man’s efforts. Why does she care?” Ren asks.

“Because she’s smart and he isn’t, and if she knows this and he never did, she wouldn’t want him,” Max explains, his voice rough and deep.

“You have been telling the same story in every test I have given you. Some days you pick different flowers. Your flowers mean the same thing to the man. Why does a key matter?”

“I graduate soon. I just want to tell it right.”

“There are no right ways,” Ren laughs. “Now, tell me a story.”

                                                                                               ***

The transport hovers over the East China Sea, its belly swollen with recent Academy graduates, high off propaganda and nationalism and eager for action. Max sees something spiraling up out of the water, a swarm of flashes and a low hum he could feel deep in his gut. He jams on his helmet and screams for autopilot to take over, and the last thing he sees is a shimmering black sludge that coats his visor. He feels his stomach drop as he falls.

                                                                                               ***

“Your progress is good,” the doctor says, “and you’re integrating with the new tech nicely. You’ve gotten a few pings for visitor requests. Now that you’ve got full range of motion, I think it’ll be best for them to start coming by, get used to your new look.”

“They have to get used to me?” Max says.

“Soldiers who signed up as tech donor recipients have an easier adjustment to their new limbs or organs - except for the silver skulls, and nobody can get used to looking like a partial Terminator, though I’m told it’s terrifying in Occupied Shanghai.”

“Terminator?” Max asks.

The doctor shakes her head and leaves.

His parents come the following day. His father stares at his arm and shoulder, his mother cries, and his little sister keeps saying “Cool” and asking the doctor varying questions about the specs.

Ren comes the day after with a tray of flowers: real ones, wilted and sweet.

“Pick one,” Ren says.

Max curls his new slender, silver fingers around a blossom. He liberates one of the white roses from the tray and hands it to Ren.

“He fell in love with the smartest woman he knew,” Max says.

Ren smiles and nods.

Written by: Erin Justice
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe

Buggies

The word moves up and down the line of men, from one to the next. They might as well be playing the game Telephone.

“Gas,” they whisper.

At least, we believe it’s gas. We soldiers of the night, brave and not long for this world, look to the west and watch the gas bear down on us. It is thick and ominous. By now, we know not what we think, but this…this…thing; this thing is death. It has no smell, and it moves with the lethargic quality of a goddamn turtle. In this way, it is not at all like death. Death for us is not slow and deliberate. Death will sneak in the night, tiptoe behind you, hold It’s breath, and then slit your throat with a 12-inch bayonet blade.

Oh, those were the days. Simple hand-to-hand combat, is that too much to ask? Is it really too much to ask to look your murderer in the eyes?

As a boy I daydreamed of combat, of the historical battles of Napoleon and Normandy (For some reason my daydreams were tres French). I longed for the romantic wars of our elders. I desired masculinity, not in the homo-way, but in the Hemingway.

Pardon me, pardon me; it’s just a joke. A little play on words. Here, laughter is more valuable than water. More valuable than shit-pots or tissues you can stick up your nose to protect from the smell of decomposing flesh. Here, bodies are stacked on top of each other. We call them The Towers Of David. Or Freddy. Sammy. The Towers Of William. There are hundreds of them and we’re starting to run out of names.

“I think the wind is changing. It’s gonna…maybe it’ll blow over.”

Parsons barks when he talks. I thought it odd until I visited his family over leave last Christmas and his father barked, and his mother barked, and his sister, who must have been only twelve or thirteen, she barked. They had their Christmas card picture held to the refrigerator door by a magnet, so I stole it. It’s the four of them in matching sweaters looking rather dour, other than the sister who is all braces and freckles. It reminds me of home, any home, and since there aren’t many homes left I think we adopt the faces and families of others. Things disappear and we try to replace them. It’s only natural.

Anywho, I stole the magnet picture and in black marker wrote The Barking Parsons on it. Now, I keep it in my pocket and look at it when I’m feeling ill.

The gas continues to waft in our general direction. I don’t know where it’s coming from, as we haven’t seen hide nor hair of the Buggies for a few days. That’s what we call them, Buggies. It’s not very technical or anything, but it’s accurate. They are bug-like creatures from another planet. Fuck, from another solar system. I’m sure the big brass band up top has a more professional term for them, but for the guys on the ground, Buggies works just fine.

“Masks Up!”

There’s a shout from down the line and in unison we all dawn our demon masks. Really, they’re just gas masks, and they look pretty much the same as they’ve always looked, right on back to the days of WWI. I used to read stories about The Great War. Whoever termed that shit was way off, obviously, as there was another Greater War just down the pipeline and a handful of Not Great Wars not far off. Though, as someone once said, it’s no use crying over spilled milk.

Or blood. Whatever.

I read stories about the mustard gas used in that not first, and certainly not last of global conflicts, and how the whole goddamned war was this giant clusterfuck of old and new technology and strategy. The part that stuck with me the most, and why I’m rehashing this shit now, was the instances of gas mask-wearing cavalry units unleashing holy hell on anything and everything. Just imagine it. You’re sitting there, minding your own business, trying to survive and not vomit your guts up (because of the gas), when all of the sudden this heaving beast of a horse bursts out of the fog like a fucking Dodge Charger, all bleeding eyes and spit. Its rider is staring down at you from behind this fucking steampunk mask, a wall of fire and gas behind him. I don’t care who are you, you’re losing your lunch. That shit is scary. That shit is demon-scary.

There’s some whooping and hollering down the line. And then…

WHISTLE. Whistlewhistlewhistle. WHISTLE.

Two hundred years removed from The Second Battle of Ypres (Belgium, 1915) and still with the fucking whistle. Still with the fucking gas masks.

Some things never change.

We rise as a mass of demons. Over the ledge and out of the pit, to grandmother’s house we go. We do not know what is on the other side of the field. We do not know where the Buggies are. You could fill an ocean with the amount of shit that we do not know. I think to my long-dead comrades, those of that Great War ilk, and the word Solidarity appears, etched in the mud at my boots.

I step over it.

The fog or gas (or whatever) is thick, though nothing compared to the cacophony of screams and shouts coming from my fellow soldiers. It would appear that there were not enough demon masks to go around.

Someone jumps on my back and I’m down to my knees. Sausage fingers pry at my mask and face, trying to rip them both off. If they must pull my head off with it, they will. This is friendly fire. War is Darwinistic in its pragmatism.

My attacker/comrade is too strong. He rips the mask off my face and falls down somewhere behind me. I am on my knees and I lift my head to the sky. I see the lights.

Not one light. Not one shining, blinding, comforting light. No, I said lights. Plural.

They are what they appear to be. Thank god for that.

The Buggy ship rises on top of us, bigger than a building, masked in a cloud of fog and smoke and night. Only the lights on the bottom of the ship are clearly visible.

There they are.

So much noise it feels like the world isn’t big enough to hold it all; like we’re going to blow a fuse.

As I fall forward, face to mud, grasping at my burning throat, the alien ship continues its ascent into the night sky.

It’s beautiful.

Written by: Logan Theissen
Photograph by: Hannah Chertock

Life's a beach

A crashing wave rushes towards the shore, leaving a young girl curled up on the sand in its wake. The child opens her eyes and takes in her surroundings as the foamy water retreats to the horizon.

She pushes her elbow into the soggy ground and peels herself from the earth like the skin of an orange as another wave crashes in the distance. She rolls over onto her knees and trudges towards the Beachgrass gates lining the bright-white dunes.

She explores the terrain on all fours, astounded by every handprint and knee dent she leaves in the landscape. She giggles each time her tiny digits disappear beneath the supple surface that’s cradling her fragile figure.

The land hardens as the girl travels farther from the water line and her gleeful laughter turns into grunts of frustration. She pauses for a moment and studies the fading trail of prints leading back to the ocean. Her youthful smile morphs into a look of panic once she realizes her place between the water and the dunes.

She turns to the left and sees a young boy constructing a tiny castle from the same sand that’s resting beneath her. She lifts her hand and plunges her rigid fingers into the topsoil, signifying the groundbreaking of her new project.

She defines her property with a trench, much like the border surrounding her neighbor’s construction zone. She then piles the displaced sand in the center of her territory and contemplates what shape the elements should take.

Her eyes lock on a condominium towering over the coast. She makes note of every detail, from the scalloped columns spanning the height of the building to the golden lion statue eclipsing the sun from above the penthouse.

She shapes the mound of eroded shells into something resembling the colossal structure that’s casting shadows over the ocean like a sundial. Cloaked by the shade of the condominium, the little girl pats and smoothes the sand into a rectangle so tall, she’s forced to stand on her toes and blindly level the roof with her outstretched fingers.

The weight of gravity wears on her forefeet and she returns her heels to the sand, cursing her height for hampering her productivity. She sits with her back against her unfinished project and calculates how long she has until the salty waves breach her barricades. She crosses her arms on her knees, lowers her head and weeps, as if collapsing under the pressure of time.

Her sulking is interrupted by a hand on her shoulder. She looks up to find a tall girl silhouetted by the sun. The stranger’s braid ticks back and forth between her shoulder blades like the pendulum of a grandfather clock as she peers over the top of the castle. She effortlessly pats down all the unreached bumps and the little girl joyfully kneels and starts pinching cylinders up and down the sides of her tower.

The two girls laugh and sing as their building expands in every direction. Somewhere in the midst of all the digging and rezoning, their worksite merges with her pint-sized competitor’s. After a playful exchange of accusations, the girl and boy decide to join their castles into one massive estate.

As the sun fell from the clouds and the water crept up the shore, the young boy, the little girl, her taller friend and some newfound acquaintances continued inventing new tasks to ignore the persistent march of time. The turrets rose higher, the moat dipped lower and every wall of the castle was covered in embellishments reflective of their maker.

The little girl continued perfecting her masterpiece as, one by one, her colleagues were summoned to the dunes. She only allowed herself a brief moment of grief as she watched each cohort approach the bright light of the setting sun.

She kept busy until it was time for her tall companion to answer the call echoing from beyond the Beachgrass gates. The little girl watched as her closest friend walked away from their castle, her braid now resting motionlessly down the center of her back.

As she waved goodbye, the little girl noticed swells of wrinkles crashing along the back of her hand. She studied the ripples until the young boy took her weathered palm and helped her to her feet. He led her alongside their estate until they reached the frail sand at the foot of the dunes, each mound resembling the bottom half of a depleted hourglass.

They turned and watched as a wave from the rising tide cascaded over the edge of their boundary, occupying every crevice of the trench like milk on a tile floor. Another wave filled what remained of the moat as the young boy’s hand slipped from the little girl’s grasp. She stood there, alone, reminiscing on everything she and her friends had created.

As another wave surged towards her castle, the little girl searched for the condominium she had set out to replicate. She spotted the golden lion statue staring out over the water and began comparing the buildings. She was shocked by how far she had strayed from her blueprint, but even more so by how little she cared.

The endless layers of perfectly aligned balconies now seemed cold and lifeless next to the dissimilar terraces constructed by her and her friends. Even the great lion whose chin touched the clouds wore a somber expression without the luminance of the midday sun amplifying its features.

The little girl smiled. She took a final look at her castle, turned and walked peacefully towards the dunes. Waves continued battering the sculpted terrain until it returned to a flat patch of land with no signs of the little girl’s labor of love, hardship and friendship.

The sun rose the following morning and a crashing wave rushed towards the shore, leaving a young boy curled up on the sand in its wake. He opened his eyes, peeled himself from the earth and began his journey to the dunes.



Written by: Mark Killian
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe

Yes or No

Should I still do it?

Look at her over there, seething.

Fuck! I knew this was a stupid idea. When in the course of our three years of courtship has she EVER mentioned horseback riding? When have I ever wanted to go horseback riding!?

Fucking Hollywood. Fucking Facebook. Fucking anyone who made me believe this had to be some fairytale scene.

Does she know? She has to know. She knows my palms haven’t stopped sweating since we woke up this morning. She knows I haven’t been this quiet since our first date. She knows I HAVE NO FUCKING INTEREST IN HORSEBACK RIDING.

The heat. The snakes. The minefield of shit all over these stables. HOW ROMANTIC.

JESUS. We haven’t fought like this since we thought I knocked her up.

I should wait.

Should I wait?

What if getting down on one knee is the only thing that could save this shitty day? Is a proposal powerful enough to make us look back on this string of mishaps with a sense of humor?

Maybe years from now we’ll gleefully sit our grandkids on our laps and tell them how Grandma realized she forgot to bring her special vitamin thirty minutes into our drive, leaving Grandpa no choice but to turn the car around. God knows he wasn’t going to let her do that again.

We’ll tell them how we lost phone reception and driving directions on the way, making us TWO HOURS late for our scheduled horse tour.

I’ll reenact the conversation between me and the inconvenienced cowboy who was “ten seconds from packin it in for the day.”

Grandma will take it from there, describing my total lack of horseback-riding skills, in painfully accurate details.

I’ll claim she’s exaggerating, but she won’t be.

She’ll DEFINITELY mention the look on my face when our trail guide pointed out the first of THREE rattlesnakes we saw that day.

I’ll get my revenge by telling them how she and her stubborn steed capsized while fording the creek, leaving her soaked from head to toe for the rest of the ride.

She’ll shoot me a playful glare and accuse me of spooking her horse with the high-pitched squeal I let out after seeing a very snake-like stick in the water.

I’ll insist it was a snake, but it will be too late. The laughter will already be at my expense.

We’ll find a common enemy in the catered lunch of baked beans and beef jerky, which, aside from its authenticity, added nothing to the experience or our stomachs. I’ll brag about suffering through an entire bite, and she’ll remind me how that one bite gave me violent diarrhea.

“NO,” I’ll yell before the giggle fits begin. “I just told you that so I could have a little time to myself.”

Then I’ll retell this moment. Me, hiding at the other end of the barn, working up the courage to ask for her hand in marriage. Her, staring into the wilderness, wishing we never met.

She’ll say I’m certifiably insane and rehash what was really going through her head at that moment.

I’ll listen intently, hoping to hear a genuine answer to the question I’ll have hounded her about throughout the course of our entire marriage.

She’ll either stick to her guns and give some light-hearted answer like, “I was thinking this diamond better be worth it,” or she’ll put tears in the eyes of everyone within earshot by saying something sweet like, “I was thinking how the worst thing about that day were the few times he wasn’t standing by my side.”

OR, this entire conversation will never take place because she’ll think this poor excuse for a proposal is an indication of how much I truly know her and she’ll leave me for a “better listener.”

No. That’s not possible. She’s shot down plenty of opportunities to turn me into a distant memory.

No one would’ve blamed her if she called it quits after she accepted that job offer half a state away.

She would’ve had every right to say goodbye once and for all after the way I overreacted about our pregnancy scare.

And I know of at least three members of her inner circle who would revel in the opportunity to do an I-told-you-so dance.

But she hasn’t taken the bait. She’s never even threatened it. Not once. There’s no way THIS will be the final straw.

She has to know that despite this terrible attempt at a grand gesture, my heart was in the right place.

Like that time I tried to cheer her up at her granddad’s funeral by making fun of the mortician’s makeup job.

Or that time I tried to make the distance between us easier by giving her a vibrator.

Or the card I gave her after we dodged the baby bullet, that read:

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Mama.”

“Mama who?”

“I don’t know, but it’s NOT YOU!”

Damn. Why HASN’T she left me?

Wrong question.

Will you marry me?

That’s what I need to be asking. Whatever motivates her to say yes is irrelevant.

All that matters right here, right now is that I know for a fact I want to spend the rest of my life with this lovely, loving and continuously forgiving female.

I want to feel her fist bore into my shoulder when I tell her I genuinely thought she might say no. I want to hear her laugh on the way home when she teases me about my serpent intolerance. I want to smell her shampoo wafting from the shower curtain as she aggressively scrubs the creek water out of her hair. And I want to go through this entire emotional cycle a thousand times over until one of us ends up on the wrong end of a mortician’s makeup kit.

“Claire?”

“What.”

“Will you look at me?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“WHY?”

“Because I’m still mad at you!”

“I think I may be able to cheer you up.”

“How?”

“Turn around.”

Written by: Mark Killian
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe

All That's Colored

When the shift occurred, without reason or warning, there were enough talking heads to fill a stadium – and many did. Lecterns were manned with the rapidity of automatic machine gun fire. But this was always an intellectual war, fought in city council meetings and university halls, among other places. Theories and ideas were lobbed with a casual surety that had never been reserved for bullets. They settled on calling it evolution, and when they did, the divisive nature of the human race took form in two very different but equally important questions. Which question you asked would ultimately define you in this new age of COLORBLINDNESS. I use this word in the most literal sense because over a period of 252 days from Mid-February to Late-October, mankind – the human species in its entirety – lost its collective ability to perceive color. The world through our eyes had become entirely black and white. As I said before, there were two immediate questions. The first – HOW? asked by the scientists among us. Theories were raised and dismissed until only one possibility was left standing – evolution. By a method of deduction, it was acknowledged by the scientific elite that receptors in the human eye had been somehow naturally modified. Strange it seems that, given the cavalier nature in which we use a word such as evolution, there have been no significant theories proposed regarding the so-called end game. We are evolving, but to what? There have been reports of increased audioception, gustaoception, olfacoception, and tactioception in test subjects, though the authenticity of these reports has been questioned. Regardless, they are known collectively as “The Mutation Papers,” and bring us to the next question – WHY?

***

In the days of THE BLINDING, most found themselves in their house of God. I was no different. I sat with my mother and father, brother, and little sister on wooden pews. With my hands clasped together and my elbows resting on my knees, I bowed my head and prayed. The Sunday morning televangelists coined the term THE BLINDING. They shouted into microphones chronicling our many sins and thousands fell at their feet. My father, disgusted, would turn the channel and whisper, Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Like most everyone as time went by, we continued on. My father rested after a hard day’s work. My sister attended second grade. My mother cut fresh-grown tomatoes in the evening and sprinkled them with salt. And yet every morning I believe each of us opened our eyes, and for a brief instant, it seemed possible that the world was once again overwhelmed with color. I surely did. My mother jokingly called it the hindsight of the damned. Many believed this to be some sort of punishment, while a few others thought it an awakening. To this day, we all fail to speak of the future. There will be a time, not so far off, when the last set of eyes that recognized color will finally close - and on that day we all will have lost something and we will ask why. But my mother used to say that day would also bring our salvation, and I prefer to think of our future as such. God has taken our color because we will survive, we will persevere, but we will never be the same. I believe there is assurance in that.

***

We’ve come to this place because some need to see it and some need to feel it. Some need to remember what it meant to have these walls, these gorgeous murals with all this color smashed together. Bold and bright they sit in our memories like beacons in the sea. Of all the cultural phenomena that have taken place since the blindness, the glorification of graffiti must be the greatest. Across the globe people flock to these places like they once flocked to Roman ruins. These walls of graffiti, from California to Buenos Aires to Jerusalem and back again, have become something more powerful than simple tagging. They’ve become remnants of a lost age – like Stonehenge or the Easter Island heads – wrapped in wonder, mystery, and a bit of sadness. I suppose our mystery is that nobody does graffiti anymore. They still sell spray-paint of course, and one could still physically tag a clean wall - but nobody does. Out of some mutual desire we’ve decided that creating new pieces like the one in front of us is disrespectful, or even evil. Personally, I think everyone knows that if we create new graffiti the old pieces don’t work, don’t mean anything, and if that happens then what do we have left? Some would say we are left with a species and a world that is unexplained, and we as a civilization are afraid of nothing more than the unknown. So in some form of group therapy we’ve decided that we without color are different. We do not yet know how we’ve changed, or how we will continue to progress in this particularly shaded world, we just know that we miss our color. So we take comfort in memories like graffitied walls, and we lean on them like vibrant walking sticks. We crowd around the scribbles because there will be no others like them and because there is communion in past appreciation, even if said appreciation was not so long ago outlawed. We look because we are now black and we are now white and ultimately, we are all in this together.


Photograph by: Emily Blincoe
Written by: Logan Theissen